Amsterdam, 3 September – The European Broadcasting Union today called on the European Union’s 25 Member States to support the EU’s Lisbon Strategy by ensuring that public broadcasters have a clear mandate and sufficient funding to offer a full and evolving range of services in the new media.
Senior officials of the EBU, the professional association of Europe’s public service broadcasters, were attending a conference organized by the Dutch government – current holder of the EU Presidency – entitled The key role of public service broadcasting in the 21st century (www.omroep.nl/eu2004).
The Lisbon Strategy sees a decisive role for the audiovisual sector in making Europe the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.
EBU President Arne Wessberg, who is director general of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation YLE, said it was the responsibility of public broadcasters to serve the diversity of publics and cultures within their country, through the new electronic media as well as on television and radio.
‘Public service broadcasters must be given proper possibilities, by the societies in which they operate, to serve citizens with all media technologies they choose to use, and under adequate and predictable economic conditions,’ he said.
The EBU submitted a substantial written contribution to the conference which called on Member States (which are primarily competent in the area) and on the European Union, within its areas of responsibility, to take a series of actions to enable public service broadcasting to plays its key role in European society in the 21st century.
Among the actions sought, was to ‘ensure that the remit of public broadcasting, as referred to in the Amsterdam Protocol, is dynamic and evolutionary, particularly in view of new digital platforms which provide additional means for distributing electronic media content’.
Ruth Hieronymi, a German MEP who gave the conference’s keynote speech, said MEPs would fight for the dual public-private system of broadcasting – ‘We don’t want the US system’ – but that to do so effectively they needed governments to establish clear remits for public broadcasters.
The Geneva-based EBU is the largest professional association of national broadcasters in the world. It serves 72 active members in 52 countries in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East and 50 associate members in 30 countries further afield. On behalf of its members the EBU negotiates broadcasting rights for major sports events, owns and operates the Eurovision and Euroradio networks, organizes programme exchanges, is the centre for coproductions and acquisitions, and provides a full range of other operational, commercial, technical, legal and strategic services.
Contact : Jacques Briquemont, Brussels Office +32 47 584 02 45, briquemont@ebu.ch